An argument can also be made that whenever the economy has looked that good by the statistics you listed, it usually was the peak of the cycle. Just because we are doing good today does not mean we will be good next year, or the year after. Especially since there is an awful lot of kindling laying around right now in the form of record high corporate debt.Kbg wrote: ↑Sun Apr 21, 2019 5:40 pm I’m going to break ranks with this thread, by the vast majority of objective economic indicators the US is doing extremely well right now. Inflation is low (with NO deflation) wages are up, unemployment is down, corporate profits are doing quite well, tax receipts are up. It’s quite easy to receive an objective view of the US economy with about 5-10 data points from the FRED website. In fact, you can do it pretty well with just 1 - the monthly employment numbers.
We can debate economic inequality, the best way to do stimulus, debt levels, quality of jobs etc. but the economy is very solid.
People thought that sub-prime mortgage bubble caused a lot of pain, the current corporate debt landscape could turn out to be much worse. A decade of low interest rates caused a lot of malinvestment and a lot of zombie companies. Every debt bubble in history has always popped, there has never truly been a such thing as a "soft landing". If we stay in our current anemic growth and inflation environment I see no way we make it through the next decade without another large scale crisis/deleveraging caused by corporate debt. The weakness of the central bank system is that they don't look forward at all, they look at a few indicators and ignore the bubbles that they cause. If nothing changes there will be a large scale purge, with massive corporate debt defaults and a lot of businesses failing, and the Fed will not have the firepower to generate another V bottom like they did in 2008. This time it will be a long, painful, drawn out affair. This is what causes me to lose sleep at night, haha.